Be Careful What You Wish For (Editorial)

Courtney Goodson and Dan Kemp, candidates for State Supreme Court Chief Justice Position 1.

Tomorrow’s party primaries will start the misery of Arkansas’ extended general election season. There is this one bright spot: The same ballot will conclude a blessedly short nonpartisan campaign for judicial candidates.

Judicial elections used to be almost invisible in Arkansas, which didn’t make the ballot box the best possible system for selecting judges but at least it didn’t feel dirty. The age of “dark money,” the unlimited and untraceable donations to respectable sounding nonprofits that are then used to attack (never to promote) candidates, has changed our system from imperfect to nasty.

Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson, running for chief justice, has been the victim of ads from the shadowy Judicial Crisis Network that are so misleading as to be properly categorized as lies. But in her response ad, she suggests that her opponent, Stone County Circuit Judge Dan Kemp had the power to expel dark money from our state. If only that were true — but it isn’t, and we hold Goodson personally responsible for the dishonesty in her own ads in a way we can’t blame Kemp for the Judicial Crisis Network’s.

This judicial race isn’t the first to be sullied with outside attack money from unidentified sources eager to influence Arkansas votes for reasons that we can’t know, but this year’s nastiness seem to confirm what we all feared: This stuff isn’t going away unless and until the U.S. Constitution is changed. There’s little Arkansans can do to make that happen, and we don’t see a practical way to protect political races from the free flow of dark money.

But we could change our system of selecting judges to one of merit appointment and confirmation, and every new ad does more to persuade that we should.